


So Sarah Steel Made Monsters

by availedobscurity



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Abuse, Character Study, Death, Gen, Pregnancy, basically anything you could imagine from a pov fic about sarah steel, penumbra exchange 2017, reverse chronological
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 05:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13241181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/availedobscurity/pseuds/availedobscurity
Summary: Making heroes means finding the beautiful and the good inside of her and turning it all into words, but there are days, more and more of them, that she reaches into herself and can’t find anything beautiful, can’t find anything good, so Sarah Steel makes monsters.





	So Sarah Steel Made Monsters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [achievingelysium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/achievingelysium/gifts).



> annnnnd i made a third penumbra exchange gift for tumblr user riftlotor, who asked for Sarah Steel backstory. one last time: i hope you enjoy!

Sarah Steel has her hand on her son’s throat when she dies, and her last thought is of how easily she can take him with her, if she tries. If there is anything in her marrow that is good, if there is a single cell of _motherness_ coursing through her blood, if she has ever been worth the forty weeks he and his brother spent taking everything in her that wasn’t poison and then coming back for more, she will. If her heart beats anything like those of the heroes she put to page, she will remove everything of Sarah Steel from this world all at once and let the both of them be done with it. It has been so long since her touch has done anything but turn him to stone; he will be two steps behind her, if she does.

If there has ever been anything of a good mother in her before, she will be one now, and she will let her last act be to become the anchor that drags them both down and drowns them.

But Sarah Steel has never been a good mother.

 

\---

 

Her body has never felt more like a paper lantern, trailing smoke and shedding no light, and she knows without looking that the candle is dead and gone. There is no pretty lie left to fill the metaphor, and she feels limp and free and vengeful.

Sarah Steel had two sons, once. One had light in him, and one was hollow as his mother. Hollower. Sarah Steel had had something in her, once. But they had both taken it from her, Juno siphoning everything good of her away to hand to Benzaiten. He always gave away anything worth having. All she could do was make sure he didn’t get to have anything else, ever again.

She looks at her sons, one dead and one not, and wonders which one is emptier. It must be Ben, she decides, because there is no such thing as emptiness in a vessel that was not made to hold. “You were supposed to look out for each other,” she says, and Juno has the gall to still look like him, to still wear her face and her eyes like he has any right to them, like he wouldn’t throw them aside into Mars’ deceitful begging hands if he could, and his face is the kind of broken that her father had taught her to never, ever be, and it makes her hate everything that has ever had the Steel name in its genetics.

She wants to delude herself that Juno is not-hers. He is a changeling, a wight. He is the creature she found in a basket floating riverside. He is Ben’s shadow, an imaginary friend come to life. But of course he is hers. No one made a monster like Sarah Steel did.

“And now look what you did,” she scolds, and she can see right into her sons’ chests and she thinks their hearts might still, against all odds, beat the same.

 

\---

 

 

She does everything she can. She drags her unwilling body through every day, and she works, and she struggles and feels like she is slamming her head through the drywall with every draft she finishes, but she is taking care of them when everyone said she never could, that she was cold and sharp and poison to any living thing.

She is doing it, and she is so close to being done and knowing that her sons will be safe and secure and she doesn’t need to think anymore, about whether they will survive the inevitable collapse that keeps piling up inside of her, and then Juno. _Juno_. Juno, who doesn’t learn the right lessons, doesn’t listen to the right part of the stories, who reaches out his hand to pet a wounded animal and cries when it snaps at his hand. Who lets Ben trail right behind him and wades into the muddy waters first when it would have been better not to go at all. Who takes and takes and takes and then doesn’t even keep, only gives away, because he wants to be a hero, like in her _stupid stupid_ stories that she can’t even tell well enough that her sons hear her.

She should have known. He took everything good from her, hadn’t he? He made her into the broken halves of a mold that had created one perfect thing before falling apart forever.

She knows she should be grateful, that one of her sons would protect the other from all of the sharp and terrible things in the world and in their blood. But it’s not just Ben. It’s the whole damn world. He’ll hand anything right over to anyone that looks like he can make them want him, make them need him, and it made her furious even before he handed over their whole future, because the three of them all should have been enough for him. Benzaiten was happy enough to hold onto the hem of her jacket and the edge of his brother’s sleeve without reaching out to anything else, so what did Juno think he was going to find anywhere else? She had told him. She had warned them both, and now he’s given it all away and she has nothing left. He handed it all straight into those grasping hands the city has, that want to rip her and her children apart. He keeps giving people pieces of himself and pieces of her and _they don’t deserve it_ , none of them do, she feels like she’s spent half a lifetime with her hand on his arm pulling him to the houses of neighborhood parents and making him take it all back, every piece he can, and he never learns, and now?

She’s done trying.

 

\---

 

This family looks no different from anyone else’s. There is nothing missing in them, save for the hollow cavity in the center of the solitary matriarch. Everything she touches shakes her body like a bell and sends echoes resounding through the house and she knows the twins can hear her, it’s all so loud and clear and they must know, they must know that they took so much out of her in the making of them. 

She doesn’t know how to teach them that they should be afraid of this emptiness in her. She doesn’t want them to know that the places where she is empty are the places where other people have organs and life and soul. So she doesn’t tell them.

She doesn’t tell them, even when Juno splays out on the living room floor, wanting a place that is more home than home, and doesn’t move until she carries him and Ben to bed, one under each arm, and Benzaiten squirms and laughs into her side and Juno sways like a ragdoll and stares at the floor like there’s nothing there.

She doesn’t tell them when Juno comes home with a split lip and Benzaiten can’t sit still or erase the concern from his brow until the next morning when he has one in the exact same place, a mirror image, and he tells her he fell, like his brother did.

She doesn’t tell them when Juno and Ben start playing games she doesn’t understand, games where one flops into the other and then they both go limp and try to lean against each other so they stay standing, and Juno always collapses first so Ben can fall on top of him, over and over again.

She doesn’t tell them when they come home with matching cuts and bruises, over and over again, and she can’t stop imagining them fully grown and wearing each other’s scars. She can’t stop imagining her sons, hurting each other while the ground beneath their feet tries to fracture and rise and swallow them up and leave her alone again.

It’s not the hollowness of her that’s the problem, it’s the city that tries so hard to kill her for it. So she tells them about all the ways Mars wants them all dead. She tells them almost everything that could have saved her, without stories now, as clearly as she can, because they need to understand. They need to survive. They’re the best thing that will come of Sarah Steel, she knows it, and they are beautiful and bright enough that Mars will want them for itself and she _will not let it take them_ the way it took her, gradually, slowly, like sand spilling from a broken human hourglass.

 

 

\---

 

The city around them breathes, and it wants, and it takes. Any glimmer of beauty or goodness that showed, it claws away and piles on its decaying hoard, because Hyperion City takes everything that its owners refuse to give. It self-cannibalizes, consumes every part that is too weak to withstand it, to keep itself from being uprooted and letting the decaying dome fall gently upwards into the empty expanse of space, piece by piece. 

She looks at her sons and feels a pang of jealousy for the two of them, together. They have a chance. Solitary survival is impossible. (Sarah had done it, but it was impossible. She survived by grabbing whatever was in reach and appending it to herself to replace the stolen parts, and now every part of her body feels ill-made and unfitting, and she mourns the loss of the pieces that would have slotted in perfectly). Juno and Benzaiten have each other, and they each only need to be able to swivel their heads one hundred and eighty degrees. They could bludgeon the sharp edges of the world around them into something blunt and dull, together.

But right now they are too young, too small. Their arms are soft and round and Sarah Steel recoils in fear when she feels the yield of their flesh under her grip. They are too small to be strong and and too newly made to be sturdy so they have to be smart, they have to be wise, but they are too young for wisdom, too, and she sees in her eyes that they have seen too little of this world to recognize its jagged edges for what they are. The apathetic violence of remaining on this side of death is something they will learn of Mars just by living in it, but they can’t understand. Not yet.

They listen to her, when she tells stories. So she gives them stories. Stories about all the monsters you could face too young, stories about the person you have to be before you could kill them. Stories about knowing your enemy and seeing sharp teeth and violent eyes and grabbing what you loved and _running_ because the easiest way to survive, sometimes the only, is never facing the monster at all.

But her sons want monsters slain, so Sarah Steel slays monsters.

 

\---

 

They wake at the same time and sleep at the same time, and that should make it all much easier. 

It doesn’t. One is always, always prodding the other awake, as if facing the world with an empty space next to him is unbearable. As if they only want to be all three of them, together.

They are still part of her, even from the outside, and she doesn’t know how they survived in a body like hers that didn’t even want to keep itself alive, let alone two intruders. She doesn’t want them back, exactly. They are safer outside of her. But she is tired. It was easier when they were all one person.

She wants to lay down, sprawling across the sofa like ice melting, but it when she falls it is so hard to get up again. Her children cry for attention, and all her useless body will do is lay there and listen and feel the electricity in her brain failing to connect well enough to her legs, the whole time thinking, _get up get up get up get up get--_ while their matching cries through her chest like alarms.

Better to keep them close, always. Too close for her to forget. Close enough for her to reach an arm out and check their breathing. Close enough that she is afraid that they would suffocate in her proximity. Close enough that it was only her and her sons, together, and if the world marched in through the front door to break her they would all break at once, not a one left behind.

 

\---

 

Mars looks new whenever they see it for the first time, their faces curious and unafraid.

She tries to be unafraid. She tries to be curious.

Mars is beautiful for them. It’s on their faces, in the way that their eyes grow so wide and fixate on rusted metal and irradiated sand.

Sarah Steel sees Mars for the first time, too. She sees the people who stare at her sons for too long. She sees shady deals in the park, and discarded razor blades on the ground, and coworkers asking if they can borrow the twins for a shoot _(and she’d rather cut off her own arm than put them on a stage for the whole city to try to take, she will not let anyone take them from her, but she says yes because this is her job and she needs to keep it, for them, and the whole time they are gone she holds burning bile in her throat, and she holds them close to her whenever they go out from then on)._

She sees the city’s beauty like bright markings on a venomous frog: _do not touch. not for human consumption._ And her sons would have shoved the whole damn thing in their mouths whole if she wasn’t there to stop them.

 

\---

 

It is forty weeks of constant panic. She is making living things deep in her stomach, but all her body knows how to do is die and decay and collapse, and the only things she has ever made are monsters.

Sometimes they _move_ in her, and she is so afraid that it makes her nauseous. People try to touch her. People try to congratulate her. People do touch her and do congratulate her, and she draws back like she’s been burned.

It’s not unlike a fluttering twitch in her muscles, a nonstop shake in her hand, an irregular mole on her shoulder. When she thinks of it as another potential wrongness in her body it is simpler. Another thing she can ignore until it’s over. Except this would never be over, would it? Inside or outside her, they would be there.

Even if she toppled down the stairs, or was trapped in the elevator and starved just enough, or was hit by the crossfire of a Midtown shootout, this was permanent. It happened to her, and now sometimes she feels something move in her and she wants to curl up in a ball and whimper, _stop stop stop stop stop stop don’t_ , and she knows everyone can hear her think it, she doesn’t know how but she knows they can, she knows they know she is nothing like a mother and never will be. But none of them stop her.

 

 

\---

 

 

Making heroes means finding the beautiful and the good inside of her and turning it all into words, but there are days, more and more of them, that she reaches into herself and can’t find anything beautiful, can’t find anything good, so Sarah Steel makes monsters.

Monsters who flashed sharp teeth and threatened to kill without a second thought.

Monsters who demanded sacrifice to match their appetite.

Monsters who followed, and waited, and watched, but never struck, only loomed.

Monsters who didn’t know they were monsters until they killed the wrong thing and saw themselves reflected in the mess of it.

It was easier to make a hero when you could see where the sword entered the monster’s heart and work backwards from there. Making a good monster meant lining up a series of heroes and figuring out if there was a way they could fight the thing without getting killed.

Sarah Steel sent too many heroes to an early grave by way of survival of the fittest, trying to find the one person in her with just enough blind luck to have all the qualities they needed to live. It was gory and violent and it made her feel sick even when it was all in her head, but no one saw a monster for what it was if it didn’t show how it killed, and a hero wasn’t a hero until they withstood it.

And withstanding meant being battered and ripped to pieces and not knowing how you were living but staying alive anyway, so this is what she had to do to them, to make them real.

“You ever think of your characters like your kids?” the man in the seat next to her asks, and Sarah can’t help but let out a disbelieving laugh.

“No,” she says definitively. “They’re just… the people who live there. I didn’t make them. They’re the ones who showed up.”

“Huh,” he says. “Weird. It just seems like you really care about them, you know?”

“Yeah, that’s how I know I don’t think of them as children,” she deadpans with a wry smile.

He laughs, because he doesn’t know anything, and never has. His plots are as fast and messy and flimsy as thrusting a sword through a paper bag. “Why is it that the people who don’t want kids are always the ones who’d do the best job raising them?” and her spine rolls like spikes are rising from it, and she wants to hiss at him like a cat.

“You don’t know anything about me,” she says, like it’s a pleasantry and not a stab, before turning back to her whiteboard and making wide arcs with the eraser. “For all you know, I’d be a disaster. I’d churn out a monster and watch it tear the whole city down in front of me.”

“Monster or not, if they end up anything like you, you’ll be just fine,” he says, a bemused smile on his lips, and Sarah doesn’t have the heart to tell him.


End file.
